Monthly Archives: March 2015

B: Really had no idea what the topic was about. I just kinda went with it.

So…. yeah. We’ll see how well this turns out.

The prompt this month was:

“What are your thoughts on reading or writing books in non-novel formats? Are there any you’ve particularly enjoyed?”

First of all, what is a non-novel format?

It’s pretty much exactly what the name implies; it’s a book/story/etc written not in the standard format of sentence-paragraph-chapter-book, but in a different style/release format. It could be a serialized book: parts of a book that come out periodically, or it could be something like a diary. It’s really an expansive genre.

I haven’t actually written any non-novel formatted books; I’m rather partial to my paragraphs and chapters. However, I have read more than I thought I had at the beginning of this post.

Serialized Novels:

Serialized novels are novels that are released in parts; for example, a chapter gets released in a magazine/newspaper every other week. Several of today’s “classics” are serialized novels: Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and Great Expectations, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina were all released periodically.

Of course, in our modern world’s society where (almost) everyone is dependent on the internet, you can’t think that people won’t use the interconnectivity of the internet to inject their writing into the web, where it comes to rest on the screens of people all over the world, waiting to be devoured. Websites and online communities have been built around this fact; FanFiction, WattPad, Figment, to name a few. Writers put up their work, and the online audience reads and comments on it.

One of my personal favourites in this category is the Narnia (duh) FanFic A Rabbit Hearted Girl by Slenderstell. I LOVED it so much. the link is here.

Diary-Style:

For me, I read the Dear Canada series (comparable to the Dear America series for those of you on the south side of the border) where fictional girls write about their experiences in real-life events in Canadian history. For example, I remember reading one about a Chinese girl who immigrated to Canada with her father, and he was working to raise money to bring the rest of their family over. There was another written by a Native girl, who describes the white men coming to her land. Or another about the Halifax explosion in 1917. One that I remember distinctly, though not the title or what it was about, but that there was a stain on the paper because the girl writing it spilled applesauce or jam or something on it. I remember thinking that that was so cool; I’d never seen something like that before.

However, another possible example of this, though maybe slightly more novel-like, is the Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series, about a middle-schooler who is really kind of clueless. He does go through many things that middle-schoolers today go through; bullying, questions on popularity and girls, etc.

Poetry:

People will also publish a book of poems, where the poem on one side of the page may very well have nothing to do with the one on the next side. for example, poet Shel Silverstein has produced several books of poems, which have become quite popular. Some of his books are: Falling Up, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and A Light in the Attic.

What do you think of non-novel books? Could things like collections of comic books be considered part of this genre?

Hope you enjoyed this!

❤

Psst! These are the other wonderful people participating in the blog chain. Check them out!!!!